How Did the Game Genie Work?

Wikimedia CommonsThe Game Genie was the technological holy grail of my Nintendo-playing childhood. Here was a device that would let me play Super Mario Bros. with infinite lives, or get infinite rockets in Metroid. Here's exactly how it worked, and how people are still using it today.

Plugging In

From the start, the Game Genie was marketed as a "game enhancer," though there's a fine line between "enhancing" and "cheating." In short, it was able to modify games at startup, so you could change them in ways that made your gaming life easier—typical enhancements involved adding lives or weapons, or in rare cases strange things like accessing hidden areas of the game that weren't normally playable.

The NES Game Genie was designed to be crammed into the front of the NES; it stuck out the front and you had to attach game cartridges to the slot on the Game Genie. The Game Genie had a wicked set of connector pins that attached to the NES's slot with a death grip. This connection ended up being a double-edged sword: using the Game Genie could eventually damage your NES's cartridge slot if you inserted and removed it a lot. But if you left it inserted permanently, it effectively replaced the NES cartridge slot, and that connection could be more reliable than inserting and removing games within the NES itself. So the good news was that if you were willing to keep the Game Genie in there forever, it could provide a more reliable connection for your games, and was probably better than blowing into your cartridges.

Here's a totally rad commercial (right down to the Bill and Ted knockoff dudes) explaining, in kid-friendly terms, how the Game Genie worked: